True Crime

6

In my youth, I was a racer of cars. A dragster, I mean. The teenage terror of Long Island’s byways. Well, I’d seen it in old movies and it was as good a form of rebellion as any. My parents-my adopted parents-were softspoken, thoughtful and humorless attorneys, pater for a firm of environmental activists, and mater for a planning group that fought for housing for the poor. I could think of no better way to irritate them both than mindlessly vroom-vrooming jalops up and down the Guyland boulevards, pistons at the limit. My parents and I, we don’t speak much anymore, so I guess it must’ve worked.

I mention this only because the habit stuck. I drove a floppy-gutted Tempo these days. A slumping blue sad sack of a car. It could jump from zero to fifty in a generation, if you had the time. And still, I had managed to beat the bejesus out of it. Working it up to impossible speeds, screeching round corners, tatting through traffic like a lacemaker’s needle. I never had time to tune the poor machine, or wash it even. It was ratty with grime. It sputtered and popped and whined in its exertions. But I showed it no mercy, and I made it run.

I gunned it now out of the News parking lot, lanced it through a gap in the noonday stream of cars and joined the race along the boulevard. It was still twenty minutes before twelve o’clock noon. I’d promised my wife to be home by the hour, and it wasn’t going to be a problem, not the way I drove. Getting home in time seemed like a pretty good idea to me. I had a notion that this day was not going to end before word of my latest indiscretion reached Barbara’s ears. She had promised to leave me if she caught me cheating again, and I was pretty sure she meant it. Still, begging shamelessly had worked once and it might work once more. So I wanted to keep her in as good a mood as possible.

Getting home in time, taking Davy to the zoo: that was the ticket. Zip right on back to Skinker-De Balivere, that was the smart guy’s plan. What would’ve been stupid, on the other hand-what would’ve been, you might say, the Dunderhead Strategy-would be to detour round the park out to Dogtown to have a look at Pocum’s grocery. Just to get a gander at the crime scene, I mean. To get a feel for the murder’s choreography, if you will. That-on a story like this, on a human interest sidebar about a guy on death row-that would’ve been unnecessary, even obsessive. Even cruel, if you think about Barbara-waiting, martyred-if you think about what was in store for her today. Bad enough that she had given up her job so we could come to St. Louis and make a fresh start. She was also, as I say, an austere woman, and it had cost her God knows what price in pride to teach herself to trust me again. When she found out about Patricia, that sacrifice of hers, that trust, was going to turn round and slap her in the kisser like a vaudevillian’s fish. So getting on home to Skinker-De Balivere, taking that Davy to the good old zoo, giving her the sense that I was in there fighting on the conjugal front-these were the first steps in the groundwork of my salvation. Assuming there was any salvation to be had.

Using overdrive and low gear, I worked the sluggish Tempo up to speed. Slanting from one lane to the next, dodging cars. Painting a trail like a sound wave on the road. Ahead, the city center rose above the low wasteland of the southern boulevard. Lean skyscrapers flamed up out of hunkering clusters of red brick and gothic stone. I caught a glimpse, as I sped toward it, of the old courthouse dome, the reflection of it, shimmering, verdigris, on the mirrored windows of the Equitable Building. The great arch, over to the left and down by the Mississippi, vaunted flashing through the surface of the hot white sky.

Then it was all behind me and, with the Tempo gurgling for mercy, I was darting up onto the expressway with the big river to my side.

It was summer and noon and the city was a furnace. And the Tempo’s air conditioner was no more than a husk in the dashboard. But now I was rattling past the pinnacled clocktower of Union Station, and the wind through the open window fluttered my shirtsleeves and cooled my face. The Tempo was hacking like an old man, but it was tacking like a pro. Only I could have made it fly that way. I was a bullet, I was a hummingbird. Boy wonders in their Jaguars were snorting my exhaust as if it were cocaine. In minutes-it seemed like seconds-I shot down the exit ramp and rocketed right into the center of Dogtown. Just a quick swing by Pocum’s, I thought, and I could still make it home in time or thereabouts.

Well, I confess, my blood ran thick with guilt. As I cruised onto the dilapidated avenue, past the dingy brown stores, toward the weary old gazebo slouching on the grass meridian, I felt foolish and depressed. What difference does it make, at this point? I asked myself. But I wished that I had not done it. I wished that I had gone straight home. Then, where the avenue turned in the middle distance, I spotted the big oval Amoco sign that marked the gas station where Frank Beachum had worked. The actual place where the killer worked, I thought, where the condemned man worked. And it gave me a little thrill. I do love a crime scene. And I said to myself, Hey, here I am. And I was lost in soaking up the milieu of what I already thought of as “my murder, my execution.”

Then there was Pocum’s, just there to my right.

The grocery was a one-story red-brick bunker with a dingy, brick-red awning overhanging the sidewalk. It was the last in a line of small stores-an appliance store, a hair stylist’s, a pet shop-that looked pretty much just like it. The parking lot was on the far side at the corner of the intersection with Art Hill. I turned in there and slowed the Tempo down.

The car sputtered as I rolled across the lot. This is it, I thought. I felt I almost knew the place. There, to my right, was where Frank Beachum had come running out the door. He had crossed the edge of the lot just behind me, hurrying to his car. There, against the long side of the building, a dirty brick wall with blackened windows, was the soda machine Nancy Larson had used. I pulled the Tempo up alongside it and stopped. There it is.

The moment the car stopped moving, the heat of the day closed around me. The interior became stifling at once. Sweat collected under my arms and ran down my temples into my shirt collar. I looked out the side window at the soda machine.

It stood alone against the wall. Its chesty convex front displayed cartoons of fizzy bubbles and bottles happily popping their caps. Nearby, a small Bud Light sign shone forlornly, red, white and blue. Other than that, and the windows, the dingy wall was bare.

I wiped my palms on my pants leg. Nancy Larson must have reached through her window to use the machine, I thought. It was set up for that, so you could buy your soda without leaving your car. Then she had put the car into reverse just as Beachum, with Amy Wilson choking in her own blood on the floor behind him, exited the store, turned right and rushed into her path.

I slid the Tempo forward into a parking space and killed the engine. I stepped out and felt the sun press down on me, making me squint behind my glasses. I dragged my hand across my forehead and walked across the lot to the store itself.

All my guilt had now, for the moment, been forgotten. My wife and our impending disaster were pushed to one side of my mind. I felt excited. I love a crime scene. I do. A murder scene especially. It’s like the set of a movie, as familiar somehow as the movie’s star. You’ve read about the people who killed and died here. You’ve suffered with the victim and clucked for her poor relatives grieving on TV. You’ve scowled at the villain and asked yourself what the world was coming to. And now you were there, at the very site of the drama.

I came around in front of the glass storefront. I stopped a moment on the sidewalk, the traffic on the avenue whispering by behind me. There, in the grocery’s window, just over a line of withering oranges and tomatoes, just next to a row of dusty bottles of olive oil, was a sign, hand-lettered in marker on a sheet of typing paper. An Eye For An Eye! the sign read. Beachum has to die. There was a drawing beneath the words: a dripping syringe with a death’s head on the tube. I felt my eyes shining as I looked at it. I could get some good quotes for my sidebar here. I’m telling you: I love this stuff.

I went into the store.

A ribbon of sleigh bells tinkled from the lintel of the glass door as I pushed it open. They tinkled again as the door swung shut behind me. I felt the stale air-conditioned air surround me, cool me. I looked around at dully lighted aisles, shelves of jars and boxes. The counter was to my left. A candy tray hung on it and a fishbowl full of sun lotion tubes stood on top. She’d been standing right there, I thought, right behind that counter. Amy Wilson. Her belly curved with her baby, her hands thrown up uselessly. Please not that! She had dropped down behind that very counter with a bullet in her throat.

Now, another young woman stood there. Disappointingly unattractive, not fitting Amy’s description at all. She was obese, with a sullen, bloated face. Her huge breasts and belly bulged through the cotton of her white T-shirt. She raised her eyes from the tabloid she was reading. Man Gives Birth To Alien Through His Nostril. That sort of thing.

“Help you?” she said.

At the sound of her voice, another woman glanced up at me from the far end of an aisle. Small and pinched-looking with frosted hair done up in a bright bandanna, with green slacks pressing a shade too tightly around her middle. She had been edging along the detergent shelf, the handle of a red plastic basket looped over her arm.

I gave the counterwoman my Handsome Guy Smile. “I’m a reporter,” I said. “With the News.”

These were magic words, as I suspected they would be. The counterwoman left her tabloid and waddled toward me, breathing hard as she moved. The woman in the bandanna started sidling my way resistlessly.

I saw now that the counterwoman was wearing a button on her T-shirt. It had red block letters on it: Remember Amy.

I pointed at it. “This is the place where the Wilson girl was killed, isn’t it?”

“It sure is,” said the counterwoman proudly. Her wattles unfolded and hung loose as she stood a little straighter. She fingered her button, turned it for display. “She was right behind this same counter. Almost six years ago exactly.”

“Wow,” I said, shaking my head. I gave the store an appreciative once-over, ceiling to grubby floor, as if it were a showplace.

“We’re gonna get our own back tonight though,” said the counterwoman. “That is, if the damned lawyers don’t get in the way.”

“Yeah.” I ambled over to her, to the counter. Please not that, I thought. “Like your sign says. In the window.”

“You bet,” said the woman. “Mr. Pocum put that up there himself. He says the needle’s too good for him. For Beachum. Just putting him to sleep like that is too damn good for him. Amy didn’t get any put to sleep. They oughta bring back the chair, that’s what I say, really let him have a jolt of something.”

I greeted these philosophical musings with a contemplative frown. “Were you here when it happened?”

She shook her head regretfully. “Nah. We just moved into the neighborhood a couple years ago.”

“I was!” It was the other woman. She had come out of the aisle now. She joined us before the fatal counter, excitement brightening her pinched face. “I mean, I was living in the neighborhood at the time. My house isn’t three blocks away from the family. They live right over on Fairmount, not three blocks away. They still do. Right near me, three blocks. I used to see Amy on the street all the time. She was such a sweet girl.”

Here, I favored them with an expression of rue: the poor sweet girl. Of course, I wondered how you could know a person was sweet just by seeing her on the street now and then. But what the hell? Everyone loves this stuff. Everyone wants to be part of a killing. If they didn’t, I’d be out of a job.

“She was pregnant too,” said the counterwoman darkly. “Can you imagine? What kind of person …?”

“Can you imagine how her parents must feel?” said the other woman.

“I saw her husband talking on TV,” the counterwoman went on. “Just the other night. Real nice fellow. You ask me, they oughta bring back the chair and turn it on real low.”

I liberally dished out facial expressions of appreciation, lamentation, contemplation and outrage. As I did, I started to wander away from them, eyeing the place up and down. I stuck my hands in my pockets, and moved casually a few steps into one of the aisles. I considered the rows of Brillo pads and cereal boxes and jars of spaghetti sauce as if they were fine, rare exhibits in a museum.

Up ahead of me, at the rear wall of the store, I saw a row of freezers full of TV dinners.

“There’s the bathroom back there,” called the counterwoman, playing guide. “Fellow was in there when it happened, came out and saw the whole thing.”

“Hmp!” I said. “Really!”

With that sanction, I wandered the rest of the way back. Past the freezers to an open entryway in the back wall. This was the entryway where the witness-his name had slipped my mind-where the witness had stood when he saw Frank Beachum running out the front door with his gun. I took a step through and peered curiously round the corner, down a short hall to the bathroom. The bathroom door stood ajar. I could see the edge of the toilet and the sink within. That’s where this guy-this witness-where he’d been when he heard Amy’s desperate cry and the shot fired. Well, I thought, there it is, all right. The Bathroom. It sure is a bathroom, all right.

Because by this time, of course, I was feeling very sophisticated about the whole thing, very ironical. Because of the two women in the store, because of their avid desire to be part of the story, part of the murder. All their tour-guide expertise, and their high feelings about something that had had nothing whatsoever to do with them. Their moral outrage. They were ludicrous, I thought. And so I felt sophisticated and ironical, compared to them. Because their avid desire, and their grisly rubbernecking-they were very much different from my avid desire and my grisly rubbernecking. Because my avid desire and my grisly rubbernecking were sophisticated, not to mention ironical. And when you were sophisticated, you see, and ironical, well, then, that is very much different.

And so, standing in the rear entryway with a sophisticated smirk on my ironical face, I turned back into the store.

And the smirk froze on my lips.

I hate when that happens-it looks so stupid. But what I saw in front of me took the wind out of my belly, hollowed me like a low blow. It was a feeling of panic more than anything. I remember once when I was rushing off to a rendezvous with a gang leader in the Bronx; a hard-sought interview. I really wanted to get to that meeting. And I jumped in my car and stuck the key in the ignition-and the shaft of the key snapped off. Ruined the key; jammed the ignition. And all I could do was sit there and think, Well, gee, what’s going to happen now?

It was a feeling like that. I stood in the doorway, smirking stupidly, blinking stupidly behind my wire-rims. Trying not to accept what I saw in front of me.

Because I saw potato chips.

A whole row of them. Plump yellow bags sitting side by side ever so jolly. They were perched there together on the top shelf of a metal rack with bags of pretzels and do-dads and snick-snacks or whatever the hell they were, filling the shelves underneath them down to the ground.

But it was the potato chips that got to me. There on the top shelf. About six feet off the floor so that the ridged upper seals of the plastic bags were inches above my head. So that the centers of the stout, jolly yellow bags themselves ran right across my eyeline and the happy owl mascot of the brand gazed winningly right back into my own gaping face.

And so you couldn’t see the door. Standing there in the passageway to the bathroom. Where the witness said he was when he saw Frank Beachum run out of the store. You couldn’t see the door at all and you couldn’t see the counter. Hell, with that tall shelf in front of you chock full of munchy goodness, you couldn’t really see any damn thing except the narrow passage along the back wall. You would have had to step round the rack. You would have had to step to the right-on the left, the door was still out of sight behind the pasta boxes. You would have had to step all the way back to the freezers before you could even see the counter where the shooting took place. And even then, you had to come forward another step or two before the door became visible above the spices shelf.

But from where I was standing, where the witness said he had stood, you couldn’t see anyone shooting anybody. And you sure couldn’t see anyone running out the front.

You couldn’t see anything except potato chips.

No, I thought. No, I cannot do this. It’s absurd. It was six years ago. They probably moved the rack, they probably changed the whole store. The witness was probably seven feet tall. How should I know? I cannot do this. I had to get home. I had to keep my wife happy. I had to take my Davy to the zoo. It was time. It was time to go. It was past time.

And still, for the next minute, for the next full sixty seconds with that damn owl, with that whole row of owls, smiling and smiling at me from the yellow bags, all I could do was stand there. Smirking. Blinking.

And thinking, Well, gee, what’s going to happen now?